It's About Time

I'm a little bit drunk right now, so this will be a slightly more personal entry. I'm trying to pack and organise belongings into piles I'll send to England and Japan. I'm also trying to eat my way through the remaining food in my fridge and on my shelves, but most of it now is condiments. However, I did open a bottle of wine:

I've been reading a book by Jeremy Clarkson (thanks, Dad) and I'm not sure I like the guy - he's very homophobic to the point of closet denial - but he has some excellent points to make. How can I hate anyone who shares my personal mantra for the rudest act any human can carry out:

There are many ways of insulting a man. You could snort with derision at pictures of his children or you could chop him in half with a chainsaw. But I've always argued that the biggest insult of them all is to turn up late for a meeting. It's the stiletto subtlety of the message that hurts most of all, the quiet implication that your time is worth more than the other guy's. That it'll be OK to leave him hanging around because, hey, what else is there for him to do.

So when my coworker and I were invited to a BBQ with one of our newly-forged Chinese friends for last Saturday, it seemed like a good way to distract from the troubles the very day before. That morning I spoke to him from my hotel phone - no more work, no more work mobile - to confirm that we'd meet at a station in the New Territories at 5:30pm.

The station was a good hour from me, plus I wanted to buy some snacks to take along, so I left at 4pm. I went to the supermarket, picked up wine and pringles and arrived at the meeting point at 5:20. First one there.

At 5:45 there was still no sign, and this was pushing on rude. So at 6 I was pretty confused; was I in the wrong place? had they cancelled? I waited until 6:20 which is more than long enough and got back on the train, pretty depressed. I was looking forward to taking my mind off things and instead I spent 4 hours (arriving back home at 8) wasting my time. Plus I had 2 bottles of wine which I had no use for.

When I got back to my room there was an answer-phone message from my ex-coworker, along the lines of:

Hi, it's 5 o'clock - we're going to be late so we'll meet you at 6:30 instead.

30 minutes before we were meant to meet, and the fact that I wasn't in the room wasn't a good indication that I had left already? There was another message:

Phil, it's 7pm and we've been waiting for 30 minutes. I guess you're not coming. It would have been nice if you'd told us so we didn't waste our time waiting. We're all pretty pissed off.

How can I even reply to that? So I decided not to bother, but had a lovely email from him the next morning:

Thanks for letting us know you weren't coming last night!

We haven't spoken since. I guess I'm over it, but this was meant to be a mate who I'd moved to Hong Kong with, and he really thought so little of me. I guess I'm biased because I was pretty upset, but is there any justification for this behaviour?

Anyway, that's why I had some wine in my room.